Liman Talks His “Justice League Dark” Plans

Filmmaker Doug Liman has being doing some press this week and in a new interview with IGN he spoke about his hiring back in late August to direct the so-called “Justice League Dark” film in development at Warner Bros. Pictures.

This team-up film of the supernatural heroes of the DC Universe is expected to feature the likes of John Constantine, Swamp Thing, Deadman, Zatanna, Etrigan the Demon and potentially Madama Xanadu as key characters. Liman tells the outlet he was hired because he would deliver something quite different for the genre:

“I love those characters, and I love Warner Bros., and I love [producer] Scott Rudin, and it’s – and you know, I get asked to come in and do things that are “unconventional.” If people want conventional, they don’t come to me.

It’s why doing ‘Invisible’ was like right up my alley – because how can you be conventional when there aren’t even conventions that exist? And so you know when Warner Bros. wants to sort of turn the comic book genre on its head, they call me.

It’s like how do you fundamentally reinvent what people are doing? And that’s the good and the bad news of this sort of box I’ve been put in. I mean, you’d think it was by design, but it wasn’t. It is exactly what I should be doing, but I’m just so grateful that… you know sometimes I’m working on a project and I pitch an idea that’s too conventional, and the producers will say back to me ‘That’s not Doug Liman enough.’

[That’s] a weird thing, because I’m like ‘Well that — it was my idea! How can you say it’s not me?; And they’re like ‘No, because when we think of you, we think of like, you know – that just seems too ordinary.’ So even if I wanted to be a little bit more conventional, like, the system doesn’t want me to be.”

Liman’s also working on the sequel to the well-regarded Tom Criuse sci-fi action feature “Edge of Tomorrow” and makes a bold promise about it: “It’s going to revolutionize how people make sequels. It really will.”